Believing in Baby Oil b/w "My Girl Wants Steaks"?!

I'm so post-genre, I only listen to microgenres I invent my own cot damn self.

Last year, charts and clubs were dominated by microgenres. They spanned from crack-hop, the 2005 zeitgeist of crack-and-coke-themed rap that included Clipse, Young Jeezy, and Juelz Santana; "snap music," a type of ATL minimal, fingersnappy production, which included D4L's "Laffy Taffy" and Dem Franchize Boys' "I Think they Like Me"; and "hard & b," a type of stark-realist r&b invented by T-Pain, and which consists of T-Pain exclusively.

This is why, for 2006, I decided to vanquish genre, and stop listening to "types of music." Inspired by mixtapes, Fluxus, and verlan (the French hip-hop slang that inverts words like Pig Latin), and spurred on by the ridiculosity of myopic web-chaos which ensued after Pitchfork put, like, one (really excellent) hip-hop album on the top 10 of 2005 (I can only imagine what would've happened if a female r&b singer such as Keyshia Cole or gasp Mariah Carey had been included), from now on, I'm so post-genre, I only listen to microgenres I invent my own cot damn self. Because of my lifelong hatred of ambiguity, my personal microgenres will be based on "personification," as in "music whose sound embodies physical objects," music that sounds or interprets a certain type of thing.

The first new genre I coined, I christened "BABY OIL & B." It is directly related to, and encompasses, my DSM IV-level obsession with two artists whose synth hooks flow and glisten like the powdered bums on gilded baby magi. The first is T-Pain-- T for Tallahassee-- the Florida singer/producer who hit big last summer with his melancholy, coochie-whipped anthem "I'm Sprung". Secondly, Excepter, the New York noise band whose wicked emotional Sunbomber EP sounds exactly like T-Pain, chopped and screwed by a DJ weathering the fourth hour of a K-hole. Both T-Pain and Excepter use slick synthesizers and digital effects to create interplanetary sanctuaries for the starkest human emotion.

Even though he already constitutes his own genre, that of the previously mentioned "Hard & B," T-Pain is still allowed to be Baby Oil & B, because the only rules are there are no rules. Plus, the artist has crossover potential. T-Pain also calls himself, and his album, Rappa Ternt Sanga. The prodigy-ish Floridian is referring to his past membership as a rapper in the group Nappy Heads, who gave it all up to sing after he decided contemporary r&b was wack, and that he should inject it with his own brand of not-wackness. So when he came on strong nationally with "I'm Sprung"'s vocoder'd hook, basically singing "Do you believe in LIFE AFTER LOVE?" he effectively reclaimed that digitally-voice device from bad superstore house, bargain-bin Europop, Cher remixes, late-era Yes and 1980s nostalgists. Instead, on T-Pain's tracks about love'n'sex, he reinvents the vocoder in the image of Johnny Gill and Roger Troutman collabos, or the Timbaland rhythm-hook on Ginuwine's "Pony": a far-out and freaky underscore to his sensual confessionals, all space-launched with robotic sweet-talk. And through it, he lamented that his woman's love "got me doin the dishes"; she was "cuttin' off my homies/ Even all my other 'ronis/ She ain't even my main lady!"

You might view the vocoder as a protective barrier between T-Pain and listener, a text-message-like vessel to convey his emotional nakedness without risk. On the other hand, T-Pain does not blanche at being candid: with the abandon of a 20-year-old literalist, all it takes is one listen to the otherworldly brilliant "I'm N Luv (Wit a Stripper)" to realize dude doesn't even feel the need for metaphor, much less protection (though if there's a lesson to be learned from R. Kelly: metaphor-- sexaphor-- can be more explicit, lurid and stark than saying what you mean outright). On another track, T-Pain pleads, Let's make love in the studio, cause "where we're goin, there's no such thing as a bad note." Never mind "bad notes" are an archaic notion in the Era of Pitchcorrect: Making love in the studio sounds like T-Pain's songwriting game plan, his guts spattering with the gush of his whistling synths, harp counter-tones, and gut-reverberating bass. So frankness be damned; T-Pain finally creates a synthetic fantasia, a virtual paradisio of slick Florida crunk&b populated by muse-like strippers, defined by note-perfect sex, just based on the flow of his production. Got that Baby Oil?

Alternately, Excepter's particular slick-ooze synths on break-up rescue tracks like "One More Try" replicate that place of rock-bottom despondence: if T-Pain's love songs concoct a sensual heaven, Excepter's conjure an asexual hell. The drum part on "One More Try is minimal-- sounds like a chopstick tapping Tupperware-- and the glittery keyb chords fan out, as a sample of a woman laughing and talking fades in hauntingly-- she's a lost love, judging by leader John Fell Ryan's barely intelligible and definitely not pitch-perfect moans. The linear musicbox melodies and erratic bass throbs create the effect of being disembodied from earthly pleasure, a glossy yet disorienting counterpart to T-Pain's caloric pop hooks. With Excepter every instrument erects a barrier between listener and performer, and their particular objective is unclear-- on "Second Chances", the loud, rhythmic bonks and computery blips are so overbearing you almost miss the melancholy melodica hook underneath, scribbling over it with noise, making the only discernibly non-chaotic part of the song unrecognizable before it even starts. Even as syncopated drums give the songs more structure, the album becomes increasingly less comprehensible, hypnotic yet futile: It's clear that if we want truth from Excepter, we'll have to dig for it.